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Saturday, 30 April 2016

Multilingualism is generally assumed to
entail creativity. This raises the very interesting issue of whether
becoming multilingual makes us become creative, and suggests the even
more interesting conclusion that most of the world’s population,
being multilingual, must also be creative.

At the same time, since I find it quite
difficult to discern the effects of so much global creativity on the
continued design and implementation of, say, our global economic,
political or educational systems, a closer inspection of what we
actually know (as
opposed to believe) about this might be in order. A sample of studies
from the past decade shows mixed (un)certainty about correlating
multilingualism with creativity, let alone asserting that
multilingualism causes (or enhances, favours, develops, etc.)
creativity, as follows.

It becomes obvious from the research
literature that there simply are too many variables at stake, whether
linguistic, cognitive, cultural, educational, and so on, to allow
clear-cut isolation of multilingualism as a factor of creativity.
These variables, however, aren’t inherent to multilingualism: they
have absolutely *nothing* to do with its purported ‘complexity’,
and all to do with our choices to study them in relation to
multilingualism. As much complexity, of the exact same kinds, would
emerge if we ever decided to compare creativity among low-proficient
vs. high-proficient monolinguals, for example, or among
degrees of monolingualism.

But we don’t do this. Why we
don’t study monolingualism in the same way that we study
multilingualism only proves our assumption that monolingualism is
‘simple’. It doesn’t prove that monolingualism is
simple. This assumption is ideological, not empirical, as Li Wei and
Chao-Jung Wu observe in Polite Chinese children revisited: Creativity and the use of codeswitching in the Chinese complementary school classroom: “The ideology of monolingualism
prevails throughout society, including within minority ethnic
communities who are bilingual and multilingual.” My take is that if we wish to
answer apparently straightforward questions about multilingualism and
creativity in any useful way, we must first make sure that we
understand what exactly we’re asking, and from within which
premises.

Li Wei and Chao-Jung Wu’s topic,
codeswitching (sometimes also called code-mixing or simply, mixing),
lays bare another very relevant take on multilingualism and
creativity. This is the double standard in our theoretical stances
about multilingualism, on the one hand, which nowadays is unquestionably ‘good’,
against our practical management of being multilingual, on the other, which
may not be so good after all, as I pointed out here.
Li Wei and Chao-Jung Wu’s statement that “There is still
widespread fear of bilingual and multilingual practices such as
codeswitching” remains as cogent. So why isn’t codeswitching
‘creative’ (and therefore ‘good’), since it is evidence of
multilingualism?

The answer may have to do with what
we mean by creativity. Does it have to do with how we use things and
languages, or with how many things and languages we use? Quality or quantity? Learning to
use what we need to use, for example languages, means learning how
they work – their rules, in the descriptive, procedural sense of this word. These rules don’t exist in nature, they emerge from everyday behaviour.
But learning rules entails learning how to break them, too, and not playing by the rules is as good a definition of
being creative as any. ‘Creativity’, however, depends on
who’s deciding which rules – or rather whose rules – can
and cannot be broken. This is why we award literary and other prizes
to certain rule-breakers: we praise them for doing things outside the
box. And this is why multilinguals don’t
get prizes for breaking rules when they mix languages: we don’t
praise those who do things outside the language.

I’ve dealt before with this misconception that multilingualism is best approached by
investigating the languages of multilinguals instead of the language
users themselves, and I’ll return to it very soon.
Meanwhile, still on the topic of creativity, I’ll have to qualify
what I say in my second paragraph, above. The next post, a guest
post, offers evidence that rethinking approaches to teaching, and
implementing novel methodologies, have more than welcome effects
on how we engage with our new languages.

Saturday, 2 April 2016

“The human understanding, once it
has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirm it, and
though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty,
it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that
this opinion will remain unshaken.”

Francis Bacon (1620), Novum Organon
1: XLVI

Few of us might nowadays wish to voice
out loud doubts about the ‘benefits’ of multilingualism, or about
how and why this current choir of praise came to be. Not all that long ago,
however, equally loud choirs were as adamant about the
‘disadvantages’ of multilingualism.

The pendular backlash that we witness today comes from realisation that research supporting
multilingualism-is-bad vogues was in fact no research at all, in that
it failed to control variables. For example, it compared multilingual
children from lower socio-economic strata with monolingual children
from higher ones. The turning point dates from 1962, and is credited
to Elizabeth Peal and Wallace E. Lambert’s study The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. It also compared
multilinguals to monolinguals, but it removed confounding variables
to find that “bilinguals performed significantly better than their
monolingual controls” on intelligence tests.

From then on, we seem to have decided
that if multilingualism isn’t bad after all, then it must be good.
Why? Because it doesn’t seem to cross our minds that
multilingualism can simply be. Because we can’t but find
deviation, which we then label as good or bad, when we randomly take
one instance of natural behaviour as ‘the’ instance of natural behaviour: monolingualism has served as this
benchmark for far too long. Because when we compare, we look for
what’s not there.
Multilingualism is bad when we look for what’s not there in
multilinguals. Compared to monolinguals, they ‘lack’ vocabulary,
for example. Human beings also lack four legs, compared to horses. In
contrast, multilingualism is good when we look for what’s not there
in monolinguals. Multilinguals ‘outperform’ monolinguals in
social empathy, for example. Human beings also outperform horses in
vertical locomotion. I find this habit of listing absences a bit like
putting in our CV what we haven’t done: not very enlightening, and probably quite wordy.

The question then arises of whether
this seesawing of opinions about multilingualism calls into question
Francis Bacon’s insight about our understanding. I don’t think
so, for two reasons. First, because we go on mistaking opinions for
facts which, to me, is the core of Bacon’s observation: we seem to
find it exceedingly difficult to look at things without judging them.
And second, because the view that multilingualism is special, that
is, not normal, and therefore in need of ‘special’ treatment,
remains unshaken: we remain comforted that the current ‘findings’
nicely confirm our current expectations, and blissfully immune to
whatever facts may shatter our convictions – in which connection I
must hail the inclusion of faktaresistens in the list of new
Swedish words for 2015, courtesy of Språkrådet.

The current consensual ‘goodness’ of multilingualism, however, doesn’t somehow seem to extend to
multilinguals. If it did, why would so many of us keep advising
multilinguals to become monolinguals,
or treating them like disordered or failed (multi-)monolinguals, or all of the above? Multilingualism is good,
but being multilingual apparently isn’t.

This intriguing paradox is rooted in an equally intriguing refusal to deal with multilingualism from a
multilingual perspective. Evidence? Look for the sources of
judgements about multilingualism and check whether and how they refer
to real-life multilinguals. Look for the resonators of these
judgements and check their familiarity with real-life multilinguals.
Not least, look for the languages in which these sound bites
originate and propagate, and check their relationship to real-life
multilinguals. Does it show that research on
multilingualism (as on virtually anything else) goes on being
published and disseminated in a single preferential language?
As Anthony J. Liddicoat argues in Multilingualism research in Anglophone contexts as a discursive construction of multilingual practice,
this gives “the impression that
research communicated in other languages is of marginal relevance for
researching the multilingual world. [...] The monolingualism that
exists within the research field is not only a linguistic phenomenon,
but can also be understood as the development of a monoculture of
knowledge [my emphasis].” Liddicoat concludes that “research into multilingualism largely constructs
multilingualism as a subject to be studied from a perspective that
lies outside the phenomenon of multilingualism itself”. That is,
outside of what multilinguals do.

This is why we’re not being
multilingual, we’re being rude,
or showing off,
or refusing to answer ‘simple’ questions like in which language
do we think,
dream,
swear or count,
or like which country (or better still, nationality)
do we plead allegiance to. This is why schools favour curricular
multilingualism in the (desirable) languages that matter to the
school over actual multilingualism in the (real-life) languages that matter to the children, as Jasone Cenoz showed in a guest post to this blog, and I’ve also discussed here.

This is why having to ‘deal with’ multilinguals appears to raise adrenaline to such levels that
intelligent, sensible people lose their linguistic bearings – and
their commonsense. One example: my family’s friends, speakers of
either Portuguese or Swedish, knew that our children, then aged 2 or
3, were being raised in both languages. The children naturally used
Swedish or Portuguese according to interlocutor and, as naturally,
used 2-3-year-old versions of each language. But, because the children were known to be
‘special’, being multilingual, some of these friends used to
apologise to them for not being able to use “their language”
(i.e., ‘the other one’), and they did this in English, a language
that they also knew wasn’t part of the children’s repertoire at
the time. The persuasion that multilinguals must have one and only
one ‘good’ language,
which never is the one that they are using at any given time, was
shared by our relatives, and unsurprising to me. But I had to marvel at the additional
assumption that English might well be a sort of innate language that
everyone who acts linguistically less conventionally understands by default.

Such attitudes to multilinguals stem
from judgemental discussions of multilingualism which pay lip service
to the stylised -ism contraption that results from dysfunctional reverse engineering of bits and
pieces of imaginary multilinguals. From there to assuming that
real-life multilinguals must abide by idealised conceptions of
multilingualism is but a small step indeed. We keep looking at what’s
not there.

Which reminds me of another quote, this
time from my fellow countryman and Nobel laureate José Saramago,
in his novel about the death of one of Fernando Pessoa’s
heteronyms, O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis: “não somos o que
dizemos, somos o crédito que nos dão” (‘we aren’t what we
say, we are the credit we’re given’ [my translation]).

Paul Klee, O! die Gerüchte!

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Next time, I’ll deal with creativity.
Are multilinguals also ‘specially’ creative?

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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